Weeping Angels and Bathroom Stalls
by Chuck's Prophet
Summary: "If there's anything his daddy taught him before he ran it was to never concede to the truth, no matter how deep the cavity grew. Bury the body and move on. Weakness was a contagious disease." Christmas always comes early for Castiel Novak. Destiel. High school!AU. Rated T for minor coarse language and backdoor bullying.


Weeping Angels and Bathroom Stalls

_A/N_: _For a little lady named Christmas. You win this time. Also, with previous fictions in mind, I guess you could say I have a weakness for weeping angels and the whole best friend dynamic. I have no proper justification. In the words of Chuck, I'm just a god—a cruel, capricious god._

It all started with mistletoe.

For as long as the sky was blue and mirrored in his eyes, Castiel Novak was obsessed with Christmas—and Dean didn't take that expression lightly. Christmas lights, caroling, cosplays—hell, the guy gave a whole new meaning to "White Christmas" with his face caked in flour from rolling out a multi-colored gingerbread house (read: mansion). Cas doted on the holiday for reasons unbeknownst to him but as long as he was smiling, Dean would slap on a plastic bag with a penciled-in smiley and bask in the carnival of madness alongside him.

In the meantime, Dean's idyllic Christmas came in a can of spray cheese and spiked eggnog.

He supposed his Christmas spirit got lost around the same time two years ago he found out he had a half-brother from his dad's rendezvous with yet another woman... but not until _after_ Adam Milligan and he were over. Nothing quite sang "Deck the Halls" in the Winchester family like serial infidelity and incest in the first degree.

That, and a few years back his encyclopedia-for-a-brain little brother dropped the notion that Santa's holiday was actually _not_ Santa's. Apparently, the twenty-fifth was originally a day of Pagan sacrifice renamed Christmas to serve the later and almightier Jesus Christ on a bogus birthday bash. Oh, and Ol' Saint Nick was just a ruse to get those giant wreaths to fly off the shelves at Wal-Mart. So if there was a so-called "Santa" lurking around the house at an ungodly hour of the night, it was probably in anyone's best interest to blast the guy away with a semi-automatic.

Yeah, he was never letting Spoilsport Uncle Sam anywhere near his kids.

Cas's exuberance didn't go noticed by him alone—not when he showed up on the last day of school garlanded in an ugly-ass LED reindeer sweater, red and green pajama pants that hugged his waist a little too tight, and a makeshift mistletoe hat. Charlie, Jo, Ash, Garth, and even Benny abided by tradition (which, according to , was actually a kiss with the devil because real mistletoe was highly poisonous) and took their respective turns pecking him on the cheek. Dean's been kissing his best friend on the lips since eighth grade—since it meant hardly anything to two equally ambiguous gay teens anyway—but today he lingered a little longer than he should have, giving Cas the full satisfaction of a hard-earned kiss. Needless to say, his best friend was flushed to the bone by the collective reciprocations. His cup had runneth over.

Enter Adam Milligan, sloshing his chalice into the Boston freaking Harbor.

Since their ill-fated departure, Adam has been obsessed with making Dean's life a living hell. His target: Cas. It was clever, take down Vincent to get to Jules. Dean swore long ago that matter how foul the plays got, he would never allow Adam the luxury of thinking that he shot his Achilles' heel. If there's anything his daddy taught him before he ran it was to never concede to the truth, no matter how deep the cavity grew. Bury the body and move on. Weakness was a contagious disease.

But today the going got bad. Dean excused his apathetic mindset from Calculus, making his way toward the rat-infested, grime-glazed restrooms down the corridor. Stifled crying came from the stall directly behind him.

"Cas, I know that's you. We've been friends longer than Tyson's prison sentence." Dean had said class while Cas was stuck in third period lunch, screwed ad infinitum by the jocks. This was the only way he could talk to him before the last bell.

The comment elicited the half-assed retort, "Up yours, Dean."

"I would but apparently my head is too far buried in there." It wasn't meant to be taken seriously, but it worsened Cas's state. Dean heaved a sigh and rested his temple on the stall. He traced undistinguishable patterns into the cold metal with his index finger. "Can I come in?"

A small sniffle and then, in a wavering whisper, "My makeup's ruined."

"I'll fix it for you," Dean offered with a small laugh, even though he figured Cas couldn't hear it over the roaring ricochet of his nose blowing into what Dean suspected was a measly piece of toilet paper.

When the door unlatched and extended out, the man on the opposing side was hit with a miserable sight. Cas's head, from his dark crimped hair to the start of his shoulders, was saturated in water—save for his mistletoe headdress which he presumed was somewhere between the toilet and the sewer. His neck was stippled in red marks that were way too big to be hickeys and his right collarbone was slashed parallel. If he had to take a wild guess, he was threatened at knifepoint and shoved into the porcelain he was sitting precariously on now.

It was Cas's turn to sigh wretchedly. "Please don't overreact; it looks worse than it feels."

"Overreact," he reiterated, bending down and tearing a fresh piece of paper from the dispenser crammed into his side. He dabbed the end of it with his tongue and pressed it to his exposed skin, like a mom would a child. He even chided like a mother too, saying, "If you don't pretreat this you could end up with a nasty infection."

That earned a small smile from woe is me next to him, to which the other boy was grateful. Then his lip rippled and his expression turned hard again. "Dean, why don't they like me?"

"Because Adam is a pretentious asshat who'd rather take his Obi Wan Kenobi out on the weaker guy," he said, miming said mien and trying not to indulge too much in the past.

Cas narrowed his eyes. "What about Michael and Raphael?"

"Adam has a hard-on for Michael who has an even bigger hard-on for you," he explained as if he'd rehearsed the speech a thousand times over. Sugarcoating wasn't in Dean Winchester's already limited vocabulary. "And Raphael's just a dick."

"Michael likes me?" Cas mused over the thought for a moment. "He has a weird way of expressing it."

Dean hummed in agreement, "That whole family is weird. I should know; I dated his sister once." He paused, mulling over an alternative answer that he had shrouded behind emerald eyes: _and because you're beautiful_. He hoped the kiss he planted on his tear-stained lips did justice to his unfailing cowardice. Cas leaned into the embrace, pulling him in blindly by the lapel of his flannel. Dean sucked on his lower lip like one would a honeycomb before retracting. "You smell like a toilet," he said, grinning.

"Wait, really? I could have sworn that was sea breeze and homemade butterscotch." Cas wore the biggest shit-eating grin.

Dean laughed, inclining his head and kissing him again. "Merry Christmas, dork."

"Dean, I'm Jewish."

He barely registered Cas over the flush of a urinal five feet outside their claustrophobic stall. It was then, as he gazed into his best friend's full-blown sapphire-blue orbs, that he decided Christmas was his new favorite holiday. "Mazel Tov."

**-END-**


End file.
